Vietnam’s rubber-stamp National Assembly yesterday voted in a new president, who immediately pledged to crack down on corruption following the resignation of his predecessor in an anti-graft campaign.
The appointment of Vo Van Thuong comes during a period of political upheaval in which the all-powerful Communist Party of Vietnam’s anti-graft purge and factional fighting have seen several ministers fired.
Members of the Vietnamese National Assembly elected 52-year-old Thuong — the sole candidate — for a term running until 2026, following the resignation of former Vietnamese president Nguyen Xuan Phuc in January.
Photo: EPA
In his first statement as president, Thuong said he would be “determined in the fight against corruption and negative phenomena.”
Thuong carried 487 out of 488 votes in the national assembly, Vietnamese state media reported.
Authoritarian Vietnam is run by the party, which is officially led by the general secretary, president and prime minister.
Thuong is seen as close to Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong, the most powerful man in the party and the architect of the anti-corruption drive.
The campaign has led to the arrest of dozens of officials, with many of the graft allegations relating to deals done as part of Vietnam’s COVID-19 pandemic response.
The Communist Party ruled in January that Phuc was responsible for wrongdoing by senior ministers under him during his 2016 to 2021 stint as prime minister, before he became president.
Thuong was “an apparatchik” of the system, said Benoit de Treglode, a researcher at the Strategic Research Institute of the Military Academy in Paris.
Thuong has served as deputy head of the Central Steering Committee on Prevention and Control of Corruption and Negative Phenomena since 2021.
He is also head of the party’s central propaganda department, a position that has a powerful grasp over freedom of speech and press in the nation.
“His appointment does not symbolize a turning point,” Treglode said.
Jonathan London, an expert on contemporary Vietnam, said Thuong’s appointment “would mark Nguyen Phu Trong’s latest stroke in his ongoing campaign to shape the party’s present and future.”
The appointment could make him a front-runner to replace Trong at or before the next congress, he said, adding that whether he had strong enough support was unclear.
“There’s an equal chance he’s a transitional figure,” he said.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant